nil desperandum

I mentioned previously in my Scotch on the Rocks Reviews post that two of my colleagues did write-ups of their days and sessions at Scotch.

Well, here are those write-ups.

Both of these guys are Senior Developers in the company with very different backgrounds and projects. 
James' has been involved in projects like KPM Music's PLAY Production Music site.  Andy's been working on Enigma's SiteBuilder product and the impending version 2 release.  Their projects have had very different problems to solve and different technologies to solve those problems, giving them very different views of ColdFusion and CFML.

So anyway - enough waffle from me here are their write-ups. Enjoy.

James' summary:

Following my excursion to the Coldfusion conference in Edinburgh last Thursday, I have put together some notes that some of you may / may not be interested in.

The topics covered in this document are :

Modularizing your Flex Application with Cairngorm and Modules
Top level discussion on the best practices for the structure of medium to large Flex applications using design patterns such as MVC, Singletons and Observer. A basic understanding of Flash and Flex is required.

Document Driven Coldfusion 8
Dynamic data input and output using CF8 with PDF's. Using PDF's as an Offline data storage and form submission interface with CF8.

Getting to grips with Air and Aptana
AIR is the Adobe desktop application API. AIR applications are built using simple HTML, CSS, graphics and JavaScript. The AIR API also provides network access, client file system access, drag and drop style functionality and runs both on PC and Mac OS from the same executable file. Any JavaScript libraries including jQuery may be used to provide AJAX style web call functionality.

Coldfusion 8 Performance Monitoring & Alerts
Previously, CF7 servers could only be monitored using a third party monitor such as Coldfusion Reactor. CF8 now comes with a built in monitor and alerts system which can be launched through the CFIDE Server Monitoring tab

Also announced at the conference was the merge of JBoss and Railo and that Railo is to become open source. Everybody got very excited and clapped at this news but I didn't really understand! I am hoping Stephen is going to elaborate on this for me!

Download the notes

Andy's summary:

Event Driven Programming
A very nice paradigm for structuring applications The Modern Way - some excellent stuff here that we could all learn a lot from.

Keeping your Apps and Servers Healthy
A nice introduction to a variety of useful monitoring tools, some nice tips, and a preview of fusionAnalytics, which will be a must-have when it comes out.

Architecting Apps for Multiple UI Technologies
Harder to summarise, but some nice ideas for better designing one's application architecture to suit multiple UIs. Also some good general purpose programming guidelines

Advanced Model Glue
Some features of the Model Glue framework that many people (apparently) don't know exists. As I didn't know anything about Model Glue at all, I found this one very enlightening, and made me want to try a lot of the stuff mentioned.

Complementing CFML with Open Source Java.
The least useful of the lot, but still interesting. There's a lot of Java frameworks out there which can be used out-of-the-box with Coldfusion, and they're usually a lot more capable and fully featured than their CF equivalents (if such exist). They're also way more complex and a right pig to install.

Download the notes

I also wanted to mention a couple of people that didn't get the recognition that they deserved for their work and assistance at Scotch.  In no particular order, a big thank you to Leanne, Andy's better half, and Jatin Nanda (manager of the forthcoming UK RIA User Group) for all the work that they put into making Scotch a success behind the scenes before and during the conference.